Truth Like the Sun (16 page)

SHE LOOKED AWAY
when he threw back what resembled slugs crammed into shot glasses and forced herself not to glance at her watch, breathing through her nose to slow her pulse.

“So what have you done since you moved here?” he asked. “Have you canoed through the arboretum yet?” She shook her head. “Sailed in the duck dodge?” She squinted. “Rode the Burke-Gilman Trail? Climbed Mount Si? Taken a ferry ride? Driven up to Paradise?”

“Paradise?”

“On Rainier, my dear. The lodge. You haven’t been there yet either?”

She was running out of time for major changes before the first deadline. “Mr. Morgan,” she said, “I just work here.” She let him take a bite, waited a beat, then said, “You look tired.”

He stopped chewing and grinned. “Am I too old for this? Is that the question?”

“It’s a fair one, isn’t it?” she said neutrally. “Doorbelling is hard work, even for young legs. That was a long day. I’m impressed you held up as well as you did. I mean, you’ve had some joints replaced, haven’t you?”

He groaned and glanced at Teddy. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” He squeezed out a smile. “Left hip twice and right knee once. So far. Why? What’d you hear?”

“That you’ve got a pacemaker too.”

“Wow!” His short, hard laugh alarmed Teddy, who cocked his good ear closer. “No, ma’am! My heart beats entirely on its own volition. But you know, my father, uncle and grandpa didn’t make it out of their sixties, so this is all bonus time.”

She studied him. “How’d they go?”

“Aneurysms. All of ’em. And it’s a hereditary thing too, a narrowness of the blood vessels up here.” He tapped his skull. “My grandfather went mid-sentence. He was a history professor at the U-Dub and explaining Manifest Destiny to me in the backyard when”—Morgan snapped his fingers—“he was suddenly gone. So either I’m likely to go at any minute or I’ll take after my mother and be around forever. Anything else you’d like to know about my mortality?”

He swallowed a cup of Manhattan chowder and plowed into the halibut—“the
steak of the sea
,” he informed her—and she saw a new alertness, the seafood working like a defibrillator.

Wiping his mouth, he leaned toward her and lowered his voice.
“What you need to understand, Ms. Gulanos, is that it’s not my body that’s having a hard time with all this. It’s being old enough to smell bullshit a few miles away and yet still having to pretend it’s valid. That’s what I’m getting too
old
for.”

She’d lost control of the interview and didn’t know how to regain it, scribbling in her notebook even though the tape recorder was running. She concentrated on appearing neither friendly nor hostile and waited to see what he’d say next.

SEEING HER FLUSTERED
, he offered his damn-the-consequences smile. He was used to rolling this one out to relax people, though it wasn’t working on her, and he couldn’t tell if that was because she was wound too tight or, worse yet, simply immune to it. “I’m clearly not used to talking so much about myself,” he said finally. “So you’re from Ohio?”

“Originally, yes.”

“Which part?”

“Youngstown.”

“Rust Belt.” He resisted mentioning that her eyes were steel-gray in this light. “Parents still there?”

“Listen, I’m sorry, but I’m up against a deadline and still have more questions. And I know you have to leave in a bit to—”

“You don’t like talking about yourself either.”

“I’m not running for mayor, sir.”

“That’s a diversion not an excuse. I doubt you share much of yourself with anyone.”

She stared at him, clearly weighing her options.

“Tell me something about
you
,” he pressed, pointing his fork at her. “Please. Anything.”

She inhaled. “I live in a small apartment a five-minute walk from here, but it feels like it could be anywhere, in any city. I rented under the freeway because it’s across the street from a preschool and day care that’s a ‘peanut- and coconut-free zone,’ which caught my eye, seeing how Elias is allergic to peanuts. The paper snowflakes the kids made in January are still up on the windows for reasons I don’t understand.”

He waited for more, then nodded. “Thank you for that. It wasn’t much about you, but what was unsaid was actually rather generous. You’re a single mom with a demanding full-time job, yet you’re willing to live like a troll under the freeway if you think it’s good for your boy.” He wiped his mouth, his energy and imagination returning in waves, picturing her thirty years from now, still beautiful, her face rounder, less defined, the skin of her neck loosening enough to cover that fading scar. And it hit him right then—the familiar old woman volunteering at his campaign was
Deborah
. Deborah Barrows! She still even looked something like her forty-year-old self. He’d ended that one so poorly that he teared up now at her forgiveness before he could stop himself.

As he dabbed his eyes, her questions started up again, in a much firmer tone, about his consulting work through the decades. Then, out of nowhere: “Did your parent company profit off the Space Needle restaurant during and after the fair?” Obviously, she already knew the answers, which made this a lie detector test as well as an interview.

“I’d appreciate your help,” she said now, “at putting me in touch with people who know you well instead of just acquaintances who admire you. I’d like to talk to your mother.”

“Teddy knows me as well as anybody, and he definitely doesn’t admire me.”

“Mr. Severson thinks I’m out to get you.”

Roger glanced at Teddy, who looked like he was about to rupture. “Loyal to the brink of paranoia, isn’t he? My mother’s not well. I will thank you in advance for not bothering her.”

It took them forever to get the bill, but once they finally escaped her and her questions, he debriefed Teddy while Annie drove them toward a nearby retirement home.

“She’s clearly under a lot of pressure to break new ground on me,” Roger said. “I almost feel sorry for her.”

“Don’t,” Teddy instructed him. “I just skimmed her stories on some poor senator from South Carolina. She chopped off his head, stuck her knife in his ass, slit open his belly and tossed him on the grill.”

Roger laughed. “Maybe he deserved it.”

“She thinks you all do. Don’t feel sorry for her. The bunny rabbit doesn’t feel sorry for the hungry eagle. She’s a shark.”

“Teddy, please. Pick an image and stick with it.”

SPEEDING BACK
to the office, she was redesigning the story so feverishly in her head that she glided through a red with that familiar rush of clear thinking that comes with attempting to not only get everything precisely right but also to make it engaging, even irresistible—maybe even artistic—without bending a single fact,
on deadline
. But truth and art are moving targets. Stories change and evolve. Bigger news breaks. And even if she did her part and lucked out with the timing, the story still had to survive several editors, a headline writer, a page designer and maybe a half dozen others with the authority to fuck it up. But if this were easy, it wouldn’t be exhilarating, and she wouldn’t be blowing through red lights rewriting in her head. Her thoughts hopped into the future, picturing tomorrow’s readers. Marguerite, Birnbaum, Steele and, of course, Morgan himself, Teddy and Annie, then her parents, friends at
Roll Call
and the only two people in her courtyard who get the
P-I
every morning. Probably only six inches of copy on the front, the other fifty inside, but people would read every word. The phony way Morgan had teared up at the restaurant over her plight as an overworked single mom suddenly infuriated her all over again.

She realized she hadn’t checked her phone messages in more than an hour.
Four
. Two from Shrontz demanding updates, in that Morse-code brevity of his. One from Omar Duran: “My guy saw the poll this morning and says he’ll talk to you next week about Morgan—off the record.” The last one, yet another from Shrontz: “Birnbaum’s holding it. You’ve got another day or two.” She was so distracted by this news, so simultaneously disappointed and relieved that she crossed the center line into oncoming traffic until the medley of horns revived her and she swerved back on course.

“ALL I’M ASKING
is that you just say hello to a few people,” Teddy said as they pulled up to the Grand Firs Retirement Community.

Roger didn’t respond, listening to Dave Niehaus on the radio describing a blooper single that loaded the bases in the bottom of the eighth.

“Bill Hogan lives here,” Teddy explained. “Claims he’s turned a bunch of these folks into activists.”

Roger shushed him. “It’s tied,” he said. “Let’s just hear the end of this inning. That too much to ask?”

“Yes. We’re late as it is, and we’re not running your campaign around the Mariners’ schedule.”

Roger held up his hand to listen as Niehaus described Piniella’s glum stroll to the mound, signaling the bullpen to send in the big right-hander. “You don’t get it,” he said, unhitching his seat belt. “It’s not just baseball. It’s
Niehaus
. And haven’t we done enough today? Do we really need to do this now? Don’t we already have the Alzheimer’s vote locked up?”

“Not if you take it for granted, dummy. Everybody likes to be asked. And some of these people might do more than vote for you.”

Roger climbed out and tried to rise to the moment, to look bigger and smarter and better than he felt, but his body was stiffening and his mind already spent.

“Must be something going on tonight,” Teddy murmured once they stepped inside and heard voices through the walls. “Let’s just peek in here. I’ll ask around for Hogan.”

Applause broke out as they entered the dining hall. Roger looked around for a speaker or a performer, but as the room swung into focus he saw what had to be a hundred and fifty people older than himself huddled around tables, not eating, just sitting, clapping and staring at him. Finally he spotted the homemade
Morgan for Mayor!
banner above the kitchen door and staggered backward in a combination of real and mock surprise. Laughter strafed the room. Some woman started chanting “Ro-ger! Ro-ger!” and as it spread across all the tables he felt the scratchy voices and happy faces practically lifting him off the floor.

T
HE MORNING
Marilyn Monroe doesn’t wake up, Roger opens his eyes next to his fiancée, her curls spilling across his pillow. He’d taken her to hear Ella Fitzgerald the night before, though she’d explained in advance that she wasn’t actually much of a jazz fan. He wasn’t as dismayed by her lack of interest as he was by
his
interest in a woman who wasn’t moved by jazz. How had he got to this brink without realizing that she didn’t have the slightest weakness for Miles, Coltrane and Ella? When pressed, she’d admitted she rarely noticed or cared what music was playing. Lawrence Welk, Mozart, Elvis, what does it matter? Yet once they’d dropped into their seats and Ella began humming, she was big-eyed and beaming like a delighted child. That’s what had attracted him in the first place, her kidlike euphoria. And when Ella’s voice rose inside him, he saw Linda swaying. But just as he began to feel undeserving of her affection and loyalty, and ridiculously lucky that he apparently hadn’t screwed everything up yet, she’d started spinning her engagement ring—the size of which so clearly disappointed her—and then turned to him and said, “Ready?”

“For what?”

“Let’s go, sweetie, before the rush.”

“But she’s still singing.”

“Haven’t we heard enough?”

He’d tried to will himself back into the music but couldn’t, and they’d filed out midsong, as if tending to some personal emergency. Once outside, she’d babbled about wanting to see the Ringling Brothers.

After some unimaginative lovemaking at her apartment, he’d passed out until he woke at dawn after a variation of a recurring dream involving JFK. As in the others, they were strolling the fairgrounds together, but in this one Roger was a boy too short to be heard. A full-size version of Linda, however, suddenly joined them and loudly asked the president whether he and Jackie had driven out to Seattle. Roger woke right then, with the lingering embarrassment that he’d taken the attractive blank slate of a Frederick & Nelson jewelry saleswoman and tried to invent the woman he’d wanted.

He dresses quietly and putters up the hill to his house, then shaves and showers, singing Ella off-key—
Your daddy’s rich, and your momma’s good lookin’
—and thinking about how his grandfather had always savored these morning interludes. In fact, he’d adopted many of the old man’s habits, eating toast with jam and drinking a pot of Folgers while reading the newspaper front-to-back in silence, which is exactly what he was doing now, sitting in his grandfather’s chair, though the quiet is interrupted by his mother’s manlike snore down the hall. Five months from his wedding, he still can’t imagine her moving out or Linda moving in, much less both of them milling around in curlers.

The house sits on the steep southern incline of Queen Anne Hill, just above the fairgrounds. He can almost somersault to work if he has to. And from this vantage, it’s easy to see the monorail track winding like an IV tube from the Needle to the shopping district, where Freddie’s, he reads in this morning’s paper, is now boasting that its workers speak thirty-eight different languages, further proof that truth in advertising is suspended as everyone scrambles to make a buck off the exposition.

Returning to the
P-I
, he reads that the new dictator of Cuba has announced that any direct U.S. attack on his country would spark a world war. Roger writes his mother a quick note and is coasting down the hill in his Impala, trying to imagine U.S. platoons invading that little island, when the announcer on the radio casually mentions Monroe’s death. Why does it feel so personal? He never met her and was hardly an adoring fan. Yet there is
—was
—something so intimate
about her. Everybody remembered her singing happy birthday to
Mr. President
just a couple months ago. Was it suicide, an accident or murder?